A meaningful number of Calgary charging stalls cost nothing to use. They cluster in predictable places: hotels offering charging as a guest amenity, civic parkades, university lots, and a handful of businesses treating a charger the way they treat customer parking. The catch is almost always the same — free charging is nearly always Level 2, which means it is worth using when you were going to be parked there anyway and is close to pointless if you need range in a hurry.
It is worth being clear about what "free" means at these sites, because it rarely means free of every cost. A hotel charger is generally free to guests, not to the public. A civic parkade may give away the electricity while still charging you for the parking stall it sits in — which can easily exceed what the electricity would have cost. Campus lots often require a permit during business hours. The electricity being free is one line in a bigger transaction, and the sites below are listed on the strength of that line alone.
We are deliberately conservative about what appears here. The upstream data carries a simple free/paid flag, and that flag is sometimes wrong in a way that matters: at least one Calgary Supercharger is flagged free while its own pricing note describes a per-kilowatt-hour rate alongside two hours of free parking. Listing a paid DC charger as free charging would be a plain error, so a site only appears on this page when the upstream flag says free and the pricing note agrees or is absent. Always confirm in the network’s app before you plan around a free session.